Weekend Reading #340

This is the three-hundredth-and-fortieth weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 8th November 2025.

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What we're thinking.

A new week and for the first time in a while there were no new all-time highs! In fact, we have had a pullback, the extent of which depends how deeply you were long momentum. There have been sharp pullbacks in most parts of the market. The megacap Mag7 has had mixed fortunes but broadly been ok in this selloff. Commodity metals names have been really slapped and the very sexy stuff - Quantum, Rockets and other non-profitable tech has been hit hard. This was all relatively inevitable as nothing can go up in a straight line like it was. The question is what comes next. Well, the epicentre of everything is still AI but what seems to be happening is that as the AI space is evolving and showing some dispersion for the first time. There are data centres, chip producers, the memory guys and a bunch more and it seems the hottest part of the space is now memory. Micron and Hynix have gone ballistic as all windows are facing the sea and they can't seem to put a foot wrong. The next piece of the puzzle seems to be unfolding too as Sam Altman's conversation with Tyler Cowen yielded some good nuggets. His major comment was around how the constraint is what he termed "electrons" or POWER and how in the short term the only source of power that can fill the gap is natural gas. This was amplified when one of the key new influencers on X and beyond, an account which provides research called Citrini, observed the same thing as us. The difference is he has a huge audience of retail and beyond and if one looks for a messenger to drive a narrative, he is the guy. So, it's worth paying attention to US natural gas producers, who have been in a bear market for a long time. Could they be about to find themselves in the centre of the biggest narrative of our time?  Meanwhile crypto has collapsed again. Bitcoin has been desperately disappointing, performing as a poor proxy for risk and the Nasdaq. And the rest - well what exactly is the point of all this?
 
We get the feeling one has to be careful of just blindly buying the dip this time in most parts of the market. Change is afoot. As ever price action shows the way.

What we're doing.

After not seeing western tourists for over 2 weeks in China we quite quickly worked out where they all were. In Hanoi. Despite travelling extensively all over Southeast Asia, I’d never been to Vietnam.

The drive into the city from the airport was similar to most southeast Asian countries I’d been to. Similar foliage and greenery and lots of motorbikes. The city itself is also similar to other large Southeast Asian metropolises to a large degree although I’d say with better infrastructure. But once we got to the old quarter it became rather European with many clearly French influences. This is logical given that this used to the largest part of what was called French Indochina.

The man that changed that and was Ho Chi Minh who occupies a similar space in the hearts and minds of Vietnamese people to the one Mustafa Cemal Ataturk holds in Turkey. The analogies stop there though. Whereas Ataturk championed secularism as his cause, Ho Cho Minh was an ardent communist. After defeating the French in the North, Vietnam split in two as per the 1954 Geneva accords - a communist north with him as the leader and a French-backed South. He also led the fight against the Americans for the Vietcong but died in 1969 long before ultimate victory and reunification arrived in 1976 with the taking of Saigon (now renamed Ho Chi Minh City).

We went to his mausoleum where we strolled past his embalmed body. It is a serious place. Guarded by soldiers with no photos allowed, we were encouraged to move along fast and be quiet and respectful as we did so. There is a small museum and some rooms of his home are exhibited. All of these seek to show the simple life he led and how he dedicated his life to his people and his country. It is classic communist stuff using the same terminology you find in China. In fact, Vietnam is run almost identically to China - with one difference: the French influence has lasted - in Hanoi anyway that is.

The food was delicious everywhere we ate and dirt cheap too. There are thousands of spas in Hanoi for nails and massage. I was told by one of the managers that after Covid the rental prices collapsed and tourist numbers went crazy too. This led to a proliferation of very competitive and affordable spas all over to service them.

It’s pretty clear this is a proper country. There is even a locally manufactured car which looks every bit as good as the Chinese EVs. It is made by a local company called Vinfast and the cars are EVERYWHERE. Vinfast is listed in America as a public company. If you look at the stock price, you’d never guess they had so many cars on the road!

We went to see a traditional Vietnamese water puppet show. This was something different. The stage was a pool of water with puppets performing in it. Rather unique but to be honest a bit dull. When there are only tourists in the audience and shows every hour on the hour for 6 hours, one has to wonder how many Vietnamese actually have been to one themselves! And how much is just good business. The younger kid enjoyed it though!

There was a nice vibe in the old quarter but unfortunately that was all we got to see as we only had one day. I’d like to come back some day and see the full picture as the old quarter was really just a tourist destination. I love history and it gives context but what is really interesting is what life is like at present. Where do people go? What do they do? What is daily life like?
 
We have spent the past week or so on the beach in Phu Quoc, an island Southwest of the Vietnamese mainland. We chose some downtime after much sightseeing and urban cultural education! We didn’t get to see Da Nang or Hoi An as it is the rainy season so we chose Phu Quoc in the South. Luckily, we did, as those spots have had the worst flooding in 50 years and there is a massive typhoon approaching that part of the country! We are here for another week still before heading off to Taiwan.  DC

What we're reading.
 
The idea of getting one’s head cut open and implanted with a chip is not entirely enticing, but arguably that assumes we have a choice – for those who don’t, it turns out it’s life changing in the best possible way. I’ve never liked the idea of Neuralink implants, but this story about a man named Brad Smith suffering from ALS is quite a read – with the implant allowing him to control a motorised camera that quite literally broadens his field of view. This, alongside another story of another ALS patient, Nick Wray, who posted a video of himself mentally controlling a robotic arm to get himself a drink, definitely forces the skeptics to take a step back and at least acknowledge that as crazy an idea as sticking a chip in one’s head might sound, for some it is quite literally a lifesaver. EL
 
What we're listening to.

Brent Johnson is the proponent of what he calls The Dollar Milkshake Theory and a real dollar bull. Once again is has transpired that the dollar is not over as the world's reserve currency and that despite the desires of everyone else in the world, it just isn't going to happen. But this podcast with Adam Taggart was especially interesting as Johnson has now cottoned onto something which most crypto people have worked out a very long time ago. If the US adopts stablecoins enthusiastically (as they now have done), these stablecoins become a massive boon for dollar dominance. US Dollar stablecoins are already used everywhere in the frontier and emerging world and now the opportunity is to consolidate this legitimately under the US treasury's umbrella. This is a fantastic conversation which espouses the theory of how this will unfold very clearly along with all the pros (mainly for US itself and EM and Frontier citizens all over the world) and the cons (privacy, control and generally being very bad for every other country with a mediocre currency). Well worth a watch because in my view this is a certainty. What does it mean for banks? It means bad things are coming. Pippa Malmgren also wrote about this extensively recently and it is all beginning to come together. And tradfi is now just starting to get it.
 
Referenced above in what we are thinking is the Sam Altman chat with Tyler Cowen. Altman's spat with Elon is quite comical as it is like Lex Luther vs Superman (I'll let you work out which is which). Nevertheless, that doesn't stop him from being one of the most influential people of the modern era. And this pod was really good. Apart from the critically important comment about electrons being the constraint for AI as highlighted earlier, there were a couple of other tidbits. Both from Cowen. Cowen observed that he doesn't find it interesting at all when other people send him their GPT search queries. This is so true! I feel the same. Because each search is a function of your own curiosity and not someone else's. And Cowen also advised that one should ask the LLM itself how best to use it and will be surprised at how good the answer is.
 
And then in the same week (for me anyway) I spent a few runs listening to Joe Rogan chatting to Elon in their latest chat. This is the first long duration Elon interview since he stopped working for DOGE and his apparent spat with Trump and I found it incredibly enlightening on many fronts especially the political situation in the US. Elon tends to call it like he sees it and this is a must listen for everyone. Listen to Altman and then Elon and you will understand pretty much where technology and indeed the world is heading. It's pretty extraordinary to be able to have such access to the most influential people on earth through podcasts like this. Make of it what you will.  DC